Sunday, December 20, 2009

Well, we all know that these giants provide search-engines which make our life better, by pointing us to the right web pages that we’re searching for. They have their own crawlers to find out what all of these web pages has as contents and to index (assuming that you know what is indexing) them. To assist this process, they all have webmaster tools too, so that web site owners can submit and update the information related to the websites they own to these search engines using sitemaps. The following list shows their webmaster tools and the links to them, as currently available.

Following is my experience with the above tools and the inference based on them, which might be totally different from yours and can change from time to time.

The First Experience: For one of my website, a standard sitemap was created and was submitted to all of these webmaster tools almost at the same time. To be precise, Sitemap was submitted to Google and Bing on the same day and was submitted to Yahoo few days later.

Result: Google indexed the pages first which happened with few days and started showing them in their search results. Bing took slightly more than a week to index them while Yahoo totally ignored them.

The second experience: After around 2 months, the site had to be moved to another domain, which means another URL. The same content had to be placed in the new links. For the sake of indexing, the old domain was kept alive with only the updated sitemap (removed old links) and the content was moved to the new website with a sitemap of its own. Again, both the website’s sitemap was submitted to these tools at the same time.

Result: Here again, Google found my new website within a week and started showing them as indexed. It took slightly more than a week for Google to remove my old website links from their list. For Bing, even after two months, my old website links are still showing up in results and nothing from my new website is indexed. Yahoo Site Explorer is the simple one here, since nothing from my websites has been indexed in their list until now.

Conclusion: May be, there are technicalities involved based on moving the same content among websites OR the dependency of various aspects that controls the indexing process for search engines is too complex to accommodate the above scenario OR the other tools does well in other scenarios. But, whatever that is, for a user, for a specific content, based on the previous and the experiences stated above, it is found Google comes up with result of your sitemap submission first regardless of whether that is positive or negative. For a moment, I thought that we are going to have multiple options for web searches. But, it looks like I will have to stick with Google for updated results.